As the Journal reported in December, the Chinese government said that its increased scrutiny of Chinese domain-name registrations is part of a campaign against pornography on the Internet.

The move makes Go Daddy the first American Internet company to publicly follow Google in exiting the Chinese market over disagreements with the government over how much information it is required to disclose.Go Daddy will continue to service existing .cn customers – they just won’t take on new ones.

But how much does it really hurt Go Daddy to leave China? In an interview after testifying to Congress, Jones said her company has 27,000 registered .cn domains in China since 2005 – more than any other non-Chinese company. But China still accounts for less than 1% of Go Daddy’s revenue.

Jones said that getting attention wasn’t the plan. “Our decision to discontinue selling the .cn names had nothing to do with Google’s decision to move its search into Hong Kong. Nor does it have anything to do with generating publicity,” she said. “It had only to do with preventing extensive personal information on domain name registrants from being supplied to the Chinese government.”

Providing additional information to the Chinese government is something that Go Daddy’s customers clearly didn’t want to do, she said. When the company went to existing .cn registrants asking them to provide the additional information that the government now requires, only 20% of them replied – a sign that the many were willing to give up their registration rather than turn over details.

So far, Jones said she hasn’t heard from Chinese authorities about the move. But even before Wednesday’s announcement, the company already noticed that from time to time access to its site was blocked in China.